(The following story by Cleon Rickel appeared on the KC Tribune website on January 2.)
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Harold Pearson, Kansas City, remembers when Union Station was the place to be.
When it was the crossroads of the nation. When it was the pulsing heart of Kansas City commerce and trade.
Thousands of people flowed through the giant concourse in the 850,000-square-foot Beaux Arts edifice, boarding or arriving from all points on trains that stopped every time of the day.
“The crowds in this place were big during the war (World War II),” Pearson said. “It was full 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
As a serviceman, Pearson used Union Station frequently; he reels off the names of railroads he rode — most of them memories now — including the Wabash, Santa Fe, Katy and the Missouri Pacific.
Another older Kansas Citian recalls during World War II that each night, hundreds of GIs in transit slept across the street from Union Station on the hill below the Liberty Memorial.
“If it was nice night, they’d lay their heads on their duffle bags and go to sleep,” he said. “No blankets or anything like that. They were out in the open.
“The hill would be covered with soldiers.”
Old-timers remember fine white-linen restaurants at the station such as the Fred Harvey House — after Union Station’s $250 million restoration, a railroad-motif eatery named the Harvey House Diner reopened in the same spot — and the swanky Westport Room, plus many other shops and services, including barber and beauty shops and a shoe shine stand.
A popular meeting place was “under the clock” suspended in the archway between the Grand Concourse and the North Waiting Room.
Those were the Glory Days of U.S. rail travel — until the interstate highway system and the Boeing 707 killed it and nearly took Union Station with it.
The glory days of U.S. rail travel won’t likely come back but supporters of rail passenger service are hoping there will be a new golden age of rail passenger service, which could mean more trains stopping at Union Station as more Americans cast about for alternatives to higher fuel prices, clogged and crumbling highways and cuts in airline service and routes.
There are some signs that it‘s happening. Amtrak said the number of riders rocketed as fuel prices shot up last spring and summer.
The increases in ridership slowed recently because auto fuel prices plummeted in November and because of the economy, said Marc Magliari, a regional Amtrak spokesman.
The number of people taking trains in the “Northeast Corridor,” the network of Amtrak trains between Boston and Washington, fell in November as a direct result of the economy, he said.
“Most of our business into and out of New York is related to the financial industry and it’s been affected by the downturn,” he said.
Magliari said he believes that despite the poor economy, in the long-run rail travel will continue to increase.
“Price is a significant factor, but it’s not the only factor,” Magliari said.
Passengers take trains because rail travel is more environmentally- and energy-conscious and safer than other modes of travel, he said.
In many cases, trains are the only direct transportation connections besides autos for many cities served by Amtrak, he said.
Scott Lands, Kirkwood, Mo., recently took the train for the first time, riding from Kirkwood to Kansas City to visit his girlfriend after comparing the cost of his $26 Amtrak ticket with driving.
“It wasn’t bad,” Lands said of his trip. He said he is considering using Amtrak more often.
Other passengers say that these days, Amtrak is a better travel deal than airlines, with no charge for baggage, better service and larger seats.
In addition to cross-country routes such as the Southwest Chief that run through Kansas City between Chicago and California, Amtrak has twice-daily runs between Kansas City and St. Louis called the Missouri Mule and the Ann Rutledge. Missouri provides subsidies for the intrastate routes.
“It beats driving myself,” said Ron McLinden, a Kansas City member of a Missouri Department of Transportation advisory committee on rail passenger service.
McLinden, who rides trains across Missouri six to eight times a year, said that despite delays and detours — on his most recent trip to Kansas City, passengers had to transfer to buses to go around an area of track work between St. Louis and Jefferson City — the number of passengers between Kansas City and St. Louis has noticeably increased.
As a businessman, Steven Baru, former chairman of the Kansas Sierra Club, said that traveling by train is the way to go.
“It’s more environmental, it’s an alternative form of transit and it’s a lot more enjoyable,” Baru said. Baru said he has space to spread out his papers and computer and he has a comfortable place to get his work done while he travels.
“It’s not like sitting in a cramped airline seat,” he said.
According to Amtrak, the number of people getting on or off Amtrak trains at Missouri stops increased by more than 100,000 to slightly more than 580,000 in the year prior to Oct. 31.
Missouri has been working with Amtrak and Union Pacific to improve service and cut delays between Kansas City and St. Louis, McLinden said. The state and Union Pacific will spend more than $8 million to improve the mainline track used by Amtrak between Kansas City and St. Louis and add two long passing sidings, he said.
In Kansas, where that state’s department of transportation has focused almost entirely on building and maintaining the Kansas highway system, there’s a dawning realization that rail and public transportation is becoming a more insistent issue.
During a series of public sessions on Kansas’s next transportation plan, there were more calls for public transit and more rail passenger service even in rural areas, Deb Miller, Kansas Department of Transportation secretary, said.
Much of the demand for public transportation has come from older baby boomers who are awakening to the fact that they’ll have to eventually give up driving and that there are few options after they surrender their car keys, she said.
On Dec. 4, KDOT announced an agreement with Amtrak and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway to study whether to help sponsor the Heartland Flyer, which runs between Fort Worth, TX, and Oklahoma City. KDOT said it has budgeted $200,000 for the study, which would be completed in 2009.
If the legislature agrees to join Oklahoma and Texas in providing financial support to the route, it would connect the Heartland Flyer to an east-west BNSF mainline at Newton, Kan., and to the Southwest Chief.
There are other hopeful signs for renewed passenger rail service.
In Missouri on Nov. 28, St. Louis and Amtrak held a grand opening of that city’s new $26.4 million Gateway Transportation Center. The Gateway center will offer connections to Amtrak, two cross-country bus lines as well as the St. Louis MetroLink and Metro Bus services, McLinden said. The center will also have a food court, shops and other amenities for travelers, he said.
Amtrak’s move from its long -temporary St. Louis quarters — dubbed “Amshack” — to the Gateway Transportation Center, which is downtown, offers the best strategy for long-distance rail service by connecting to other modes of public transportation under one roof, McLinden said.
“I think once you have those complete range of travel options, we can encourage better ridership for all of those modes of travel,” McLinden said.
No doubt spurred by memories of $4 a gallon gas and concerns about climate change and pollution, most voters across the country approved rail and public transit proposals Nov. 4, including the hotly-contested California Proposition 1A, an ambitious plan to link Los Angeles and San Francisco by high-speed trains capable of reaching speeds of 220 miles an hour, and which would tie to other large California cities.
Congressional approval in September of House Resolution 2095, the Rail Safety Improvement Act and the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act shows strong bipartisan national support for a safer, bigger passenger train network, Ross B. Capon, executive director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, wrote on his Web blog.
The act calls for Amtrak to restore routes, including some in the northern and southeast U.S., cut earlier, and authorizes more funding for partnerships with the states, Capon said.
Many Amtrak supporters believe that the presidency of Barack Obama, who campaigned on a platform of energy conservation and better environmental protection, could be a sign of better things to come for Amtrak and could mean a second golden age of U.S. rail travel is on track.
But then maybe not, Bruce Richardson, president of the United Rail Passenger Alliance, a national rail passenger group, cautioned.
Merely because the next president will be a Democrat isn’t a guarantee that rail passenger service will flower, he said.
Since Amtrak was created in 1971, the deepest cuts in its federal funding came under presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both Democrats, Richardson said.
Although Republican President George W. Bush has the reputation of being anti-Amtrak, his administration has given Amtrak the biggest boost in federal subsidies of any president, Richardson said. Bush provided an average of $1.2 billion per year to Amtrak, or more than 50 percent more than Clinton, Richardson said.
Bush got his reputation because he insisted that Amtrak prove it was using its federal subsidies effectively but he backed away from his demands because of the resulting political flap, Richardson said.
During his successful presidential campaign, Obama said little if anything about Amtrak, Richardson said. Officials of his transition team didn’t return requests for comment.
Even if Obama proves friendly to Amtrak, that doesn’t mean things will get better for passenger rail service, Richardson said.
“Amtrak has got to be the best-kept secret in America,” he said. “And Amtrak hasn’t done anything to change that.”
Outside of the “Northeast Corridor,” the network of Amtrak trains between Boston and Washington, Amtrak has paid little attention to trains in the rest of the country, Richardson said. Most of Amtrak’s federal subsidies and its own revenues are spent in the Northeast Corridor.
“They have the attitude that anything outside of the Northeast Corridor is Indian Country,” Richardson said.
Amtrak’s future lies with longer routes stopping at what he calls “intermediate destinations” such as Newton, Garden City or Dodge City, Kan., which aren’t served by air or are a long way from large cities, he said.
However, much of Amtrak’s present fleet of locomotives, cars and equipment is aging, much of it rolling stock the railroads dumped on Amtrak when they abandoned passenger trains in 1971, he said.
Because of the condition of Amtrak’s equipment, it will be hard for the company to easily accommodate increased demand for rail travel, he said.
However, Amtrak knows that most of the increases in train ridership have occurred outside the Northeast Corridor and is working to meet the increased demand, Magliari, the Amtrak spokesman, said.
Amtrak officials are in extensive talks with several states and are conducting studies such as the one involving KDOT for new routes outside of the Northeast Corridor, he said.
“I think we’re being proactive about it,” Magliari said.
Amtrak and some states seeking to boost their passenger rail service plan to buy new rail cars and equipment but American passenger rail car manufacturing has atrophied, he said.
“It is going to take a significant order from Amtrak and perhaps orders from the states to get manufacturing restarted,” he said.
The Amtrak-KDOT study to connect the Heartland Flyer to the Southwest Chief at Newton is a step in the right direction, Richardson said. The Texas-Oklahoma City route is now a “stub route,” which dead-ends at Oklahoma City.
Extending it to Newton would attract more passengers and revenue, he said.
“It makes a great deal of sense to do that,” Richardson said.
Baru said extending the Heartland Flyer would benefit Amtrak, Kansas and Kansas City.
The Heartland Flyer extension would help boost Kansas’ paltry tourism — the state is nearly at the bottom in terms of attracting tourists — and would boost commerce by offering business riders a great way to work while traveling between Kansas City, Topeka and Wichita, Baru said.
The extension would also give a boost to another proposed route linking Minneapolis-St. Paul through Omaha to Kansas City, he said. That route would provide train travelers a direct route from Texas to Minnesota, he said.
That would also open up another connection from Kansas City to Omaha, which is already directly linked to the very scenic route connecting with Denver and San Francisco, Baru said
“The hardest thing isn’t about getting the train sets and the tracks,” Baru said. “We have almost all of the track in place.
“The harder question will be the operational expenses through the years.”
However, despite Kansas’ financial problems, Baru said he believes legislators will agree to offer a subsidy for the Heartland Flyer extension.
The federal government is offering attractive matching grants for states willing to establish new routes, he said.
A rival proposal to the Minnesota-Kansas City-Texas route is “The Train of Saints” between St. Paul and St. Louis, Richardson said. However, both proposals are long shots, he said.
“Amtrak doesn’t do new routes unless the states pay for it,” he said.
McLinden, a member of MoDOT‘s rail travel advisory committee, thinks Amtrak’s best immediate strategy is not to create new routes but to improve its service and expand the frequency of existing trains.
“Instead of twice a day, maybe four or five times a day between Kansas City and St. Louis,” he said.